THE RACE OF BRONZE
A monotonous chant on three notes, which must date from the first
Pharaohs, may still be heard in our days on the banks of the Nile,
from the Delta as far as Nubia. At different places along the river,
half-made men, with torsos of bronze and voices all alike, intone it
in the morning when they commence their endless labours and continue it
throughout the day, until the evening brings repose.
Whoever has journeyed in a dahabiya up the old river will remember this
song of the water-drawers, with its accompaniment, in slow cadence, of
creakings of wet wood.
It is the song of the “shaduf,” and the “shaduf” is a primitive rigging,
which has remained unchanged since times beyond all reckoning. It
is composed of a long antenna, like the yard of a tartan, which is
supported in see-saw fashion on an upright beam, and carries at its
extremity a wooden bucket. A man, with movements of singular beauty,
works it while he sings, lowers the antenna, draws the water from the
river, and raises the filled bucket, which another man catches in its
ascent and empties into a basin made out of the mud of the river bank.
When the river is low there are three such basins, placed one above the
other, as if they were stages by which the precious water mounts to
the fields of corn and lucerne. And then three “shadufs,” one above
the other, creak together, lowering and raising their great scarabaeus'
horns to the rhythm of the same song.
All along the banks of the Nile this movement of the antennae of the
shadufs is to be seen. It had its beginning in the earliest ages and
is still the characteristic manifestation of human life along the river
banks. It ceases only in the summer, when the river, swollen by the
rains of equatorial Africa, overflows this land of Egypt, which it
itself has made in the midst of the Saharan sands. But in the winter,
which is here a time of luminous drought and changeless blue skies, it
is in full swing. Then every day, from dawn until the evening prayer,
the men are busy at their water-drawing, transformed for the time into
tireless machines, with muscles that work like metal bands. The action
never changes, any more than the song, and often their thoughts must
wander from their automatic toil, and lose themselves in some dream,
akin to that of their ancestors who were yoked to the same rigging four
or five thousands years ago. Their torsos, deluged at each rising of the
overflowing bucket, stream constantly with cold water; and sometimes the
wind is icy, even while the sun burns; but these perpetual workers are,
as we have said, of bronze, and their hardened bodies take no harm.
These men are the fellahs, the peasants of the valley of the Nile--pure
Egyptians, whose type has not changed in the course of centuries. In the
oldest of the bas-reliefs of Thebes or Memphis you may see many such,
with the same noble profile and thickish lips, the same elongated eyes
shadowed by heavy eyelids, the same slender figure, surmounted by broad
shoulders.
The women who from time to time descend to the river, to draw water
also, but in their case in the vases of potters' clay which they
carry--this fetching and carrying of the life-giving water is the one
primordial occupation in this Egypt, which has no rain, nor any living
spring, and subsists only by its river--these women walk and posture
with an inimitable grace, draped in black veils, which even the poorest
allow to trail behind them, like the train of a court dress. In this
bright land, with its rose-coloured distances, it is strange to see
them, all so sombrely clothed, spots of mourning, as it were, in the
gay fields and the flaring desert. Machine-like creatures, all untaught,
they yet possess by instinct, as did once the daughters of Hellas, a
sense of nobility in attitude and carriage. None of the women of Europe
could wear these coarse black stuffs with such a majestic harmony, and
none surely could so raise their bare arms to place on their heads the
heavy jars filled with Nile water, and then, departing, carry themselves
so proudly, so upright and resilient under their burden.
The muslin tunics which they wear are invariably black like the veils,
set off perhaps with some red embroidery or silver spangles. They are
unfastened across the chest, and, by a narrow opening which descends
to the girdle, disclose the amber-coloured flesh, the median swell of
bosoms of pale bronze, which, during their ephemeral youth at least, are
of a perfect contour. The faces, it is true, when they are not hidden
from you by a fold of the veil, are generally disappointing. The rude
labours, the early maternity and lactations, soon age and wither them.
But if by chance you see a young woman she is usually an apparition of
beauty, at once vigorous and slender.
As for the fellah babies, who abound in great numbers and follow, half
naked their mammas or their big sisters, they would for the most part be
adorable little creatures, were it not for the dirtiness which in this
country is a thing almost prescribed by tradition. Round their eyelids
and their moist lips are glued little clusters of Egyptian flies, which
are considered here to be beneficial to the children, and the latter
have no thought of driving them away, so resigned are they become, by
force of heredity, to whatever annoyance they thereby suffer. Another
example indeed of the passivity which their fathers show when brought
face to face with the invading foreigners!
Passivity and meek endurance seem to be the characteristics of this
inoffensive people, so graceful in their rags, so mysterious in their
age-old immobility, and so ready to accept with an equal indifference
whatever yoke may come. Poor, beautiful people, with muscles that never
grow tired! Whose men in olden times moved the great stones of the
temples, and knew no burden that was too heavy; whose women, with their
slender, pale-tawny arms and delicate small hands, surpass by far in
strength the burliest of our peasants! Poor beautiful race of bronze!
No doubt it was too precocious and put forth too soon its astonishing
flower--in times when the other peoples of the earth were till
vegetating in obscurity; no doubt its present resignation comes from
lassitude, after so many centuries of effort and expansive power. Once
it monopolised the glory of the world, and here it is now--for some two
thousand years--fallen into a kind of tired sleep, which has left it an
easy prey alike to the conquerors of yesterday and to the exploiters of
to-day.
Another trait which, side by side with their patience, prevails amongst
these true-blooded Egyptians of the countryside is their attachment to
the soil, to the soil which nourishes them, and in which later on they
will sleep. To possess land, to forestall at any price the smallest
portion of it, to reclaim patches of it from the shifting desert, that
is the sole aim, or almost so, which the fellahs pursue in this world:
to possess a field, however small it may be--a field, moreover, which
they till with the oldest plough invented by man, the exact design of
which may be seen carved on the walls of the tombs at Memphis.
And this same people, which was the first of any to conceive
magnificence, whose gods and kings were formerly surrounded with an
over-powering splendour, contrives, to live to-day, pell-mell with its
sheep and goats, in humble, low-roofed cabins made out of sunbaked
mud! The Egyptian villages are all of the neutral colour of the soil;
a little white chalk brightens, perhaps, the minaret or cupola of the
mosque; but except for that little refuge, whither folk come to pray
each evening--for no one here would retire for the night without having
first prostrated himself before the majesty of Allah--everything is of
a mournful grey. Even the costumes of the people are dull-coloured and
wretched-looking. It is an East grown poor and old, although the sky
remains as wonderful as ever.
But all this past grandeur has left its imprint on the fellahs. They
have a refinement of appearance and manner, all unknown amongst the
majority of the good people of our villages. And those amongst them who
by good fortune become prosperous have forthwith a kind of distinction,
and seem to know, as if by birth, how to dispense the gracious
hospitality of an aristocrat. The hospitality of even the humblest
preserves something of courtesy and ease, which tells of breed. I
remember those clear evenings when, after the peaceful navigation of the
day, I used to stop and draw up my dahabiya to the bank of the river. (I
speak now of out-of-the-way places--free as yet from the canker of the
tourist element--such as I habitually chose.) It was in the twilight at
the hour when the stars began to shine out from the golden-green sky. As
soon as I put foot upon the shore, and my arrival was signalled by the
barking of the watchdogs, the chief of the nearest hamlet always came to
meet me. A dignified man, in a long robe of striped silk or modest
blue cotton, he accosted me with formulae of welcome quite in the grand
manner; insisted on my following him to his house of dried mud; and
there, escorting me, after the exchange of further compliments, to the
place of honour on the poor divan of his lodging, forced me to accept
the traditional cup of Arab coffee.
*****
To wake these fellahs from their strange sleep, to open their eyes at
last, and to transform them by a modern education--that is the task
which nowadays a select band of Egyptian patriots is desirous of
attempting. Not long ago, such an endeavour would have seemed to me a
crime; for these stubborn peasants were living under conditions of the
least suffering, rich in faith and poor in desire. But to-day they are
suffering from an invasion more undermining, more dangerous than that of
the conquerors who killed by sword and fire. The Occidentals are there,
everywhere, amongst them, profiting by their meek passivity to turn
them into slaves for their business and their pleasure. The work of
degradation of these simpletons is so easy: men bring them new desires,
new greeds, new needs,--and rob them of their prayers.
Yet, it is time perhaps to wake them from their sleep of more than
twenty centuries, to put them on their guard, and to see what yet they
may be capable of, what surprises they may have in store for us after
that long lethargy, which must surely have been restorative. In any case
the human species, in course of deterioration through overstrain, would
find amongst these singers of the shaduf and these labourers with the
antiquated plough, brains unclouded by alcohol, and a whole reserve
of tranquil beauty, of well-balanced physique, of vigour untainted by
bestiality.